


The Dangers of Being You and Me

by CelestialHeavens1



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Chuck (TV), White Collar
Genre: Canon Temporary Character Death, F/M, Foster Family, Gen, Hacker, Kidnapping, Past, Past Torture, Post s1e10 The Bridge, Post s5e09 No Good Deed, Skye's Past, Spies & Secret Agents, The Intersect - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-18
Updated: 2014-01-04
Packaged: 2017-12-29 18:02:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1008387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CelestialHeavens1/pseuds/CelestialHeavens1
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The newest member of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s team has no powers of her own, so to speak, but her interest in highly classified government secrets runs a little deeper than the Rising Tide.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so this is an Agents of Shield crossover with Chuck, but also with a hint of White Collar, but also because Bryce totally died, woke up, and became Neal Caffrey. Can you guys tell I'm obsessing a little over making Neal a spy? :)
> 
> Disclaimer: I own nothing.

 

The Connecticut Larkins had been her foster parents for a while. Bryce was the brother she had never had. Until, of course, it came to an end. She was never a good fit for any of her foster families, but Bryce made an effort to stay in touch afterwards. A postcard from Venezuela, Swiss chocolate from Switzerland, a delicate doll from Paris, a hula doll from Hawaii that was later named Lolani, and Russian spy equipment taken from a secret Russian base somewhere in the Urals. She knew Bryce worked for the government, some shady spy organization, but she never asked questions because she never wanted to wind up posting any secrets that would get her only family in trouble.

When she received an email from Bryce, she thought nothing of it at first, and then she opened it. Thousands upon thousands of pictures were all embedded in that email and every single one of them wormed its way into her brain. When she woke up, her computer was fried, but thankfully her external hard drive wasn't. When she got into her mail from a different computer, the email was there, the attachment was not, and there had been a CC to some guy named Chuck who when she did a trace on his email, showed his address as being in Burbank, California. She knew Bryce was into some shady stuff, but there was no way in hell that she wasn't questioning him the next time she saw him.

"It's called the Intersect," he told her. There were scars on his chest from where he had died twice and a computer in her head. He had a decade on her. A spy and a hacker. She knew they were an odd pair, and yet, in some strange way, they fit perfectly together. They were family.

Skye hadn't always been her name. Originally she was Elizabeth Mae "Lizzy" Harris, the girl from Georgia, who's real father was a psycho-killer and mother had suffered a mental breakdown shortly after she had moved home to Alabama to live with her parents. Skye was put into WitSec in Connecticut after she testified at her father's hearing, but she never saw her mother again. She didn't remember much about her real family and one night, Bryce confident in her that he didn't remember much of his either. He told her Bryce hadn't always been his name either and once, not that long ago, he had been in WitSec too. In WitSec, she was Cassidy Carter, the little orphan with no family who lived in the foster care system.

So Bryce disappeared to New York under some new name and she took her van and became Skye. It was a surprisingly easy transition.

The first time she met Agent Grant Ward, she flashed on him. Of course, she was able to hide these things pretty well now, but it didn't change what she saw. So when Coulson drugged Ward with truth serum, she asked him all the things that weren't in his file. She asked him about his family, his life before S.H.I.E.L.D., and his life in general. She found herself wanting to show him the Paris that Bryce had shown her when she was still young and innocent enough, back before she had a computer of government secrets in her head.

A knock on the door of her bunk revealed Ward, but she didn't feel like talking to anyone now. The postcard had arrived at their refueling site, with a cryptic message on it, just like all of them.

_I flew too close to the sun._

_My wings are all melted to this place, otherwise I'd have delivered this in person._

_Happy Birthday._

_-B_

The card had been drawn free hand. It was a picture made up of millions of little pictures, just like every Intersect file in her head, the larger picture being of Icarus. He knew she'd appreciate the sentiment, and she really did. It was hard being so alone and far away from the only brother she had.

"You were supposed to be down for morning drills an hour ago."

She sent him a glare and an eye roll. "Whatever."

"What's this?" he asked, not getting the hint and reading it anyways. "It's your birthday?"

"It was, like two weeks ago when this came."

"B? Who's B?"

"My big brother," she said cryptically, stealing the master piece back and pinning it on the cork board next to the mini version of Raphael's St. George and the Dragon, but under the deco art Chrysler Building postcard. She may not have had Bryce's appreciation for art, but she could appreciate what he had sent her. The bed shifted as the agent sat on the edge of it.

"I thought you didn't have any family."

"I don't. He was my foster brother for a while. He's been good to me." A slight smile came over her lips.

"So why not adopt you if he cared so much?"

She could remember the dark, stormy night when the men came to her then apartment, before she had gotten the van, and tortured her and tortured Bryce for information about the Intersect. She could remember the feel of the cool, sharp metal against her skin, how those men believed her lie when she told them that she had hacked into Bryce's dead handheld and read his recently sent emails. They believed her when she told them that he had sent it to someone who's codename was "Red Eyes," and how she had decoded where the email had gone to, a rural farm in North Dakota. It distracted them enough that Bryce had gotten free, how easily he had taken them down once he had. She had watched him kill them. It was then she knew she could never take a life, that she didn't have what it took to do such a thing. She remembered how she had been running ever since.

She shrugged. "He did some pretty dangerous things. He didn't want me in that life." She eyed him, "It kind of seems like I got dragged in anyways."

Ward looked at her incredulously. "He works for S.H.I.E.L.D?"

She shook her head. "No, I'm pretty sure he worked for the CIA, but we have a don't ask, don't talk about work policy. He doesn't want to know if I hacked into government servers and I don't want to know whatever he was doing on a daily bases. Plausible deniability. That's one phrase he loved to throw at me."

Ward was staring at her now and she knew what he was seeing. She was pale and had dark circles under her eyes from the migraine she'd had for the past day. It was obvious the Intersect was glitching, but she didn't know how she could hack it to fix it. She wondered briefly if Bryce could fix it, but also knew that he didn't write the coding for the computer in her brain and she had been the one stupid enough to upload it. "Are you feeling okay?"

"I'm fine," she answered automatically, but Ward obviously didn't believe her, because he stood up and crossed the few feet between the bed and the door.

"Get some sleep. We'll have a double set of drills tomorrow." He slid the door closed and she sighed, laying back, closing her eyes.

She could quite honestly say she had no idea how she wound up there, pressed between the wall and the hard male body. They were fighting for dominance, it felt like all they ever did was fight to be dominant, but this time it was control of their kiss. His mouth was bruising against hers and she was feeling lightheaded from the lack of air when they broke apart, panting hard. He looked like he might run, once he realized what he had done, and she felt a shot of pain go through her. He regretted kissing her and she was hopelessly in love with him. Rather than hear him reject her, she darted past him and out of the room.

In reality, there's only so much space to hide when you live in an airplane and eventually the person you're trying to avoid is going to catch up with you. She had made the mistake of hiding the air ducts and it was obvious to her that Bryce had taught her more than just how to use a computer. When she thought that it would be clear, that he'd be in his room or training or something, she had gone back to her bunk, only to find him sitting on her bed, looking at the latest postcard that Bryce had sent her, his hack into the Intersect to fix it.

"Why'd you run, Skye?" She stared at him, frozen. She wished he'd just go ahead and reject her instead of acting like he cared. It'd be easier on her heart and she might actually stand a chance at recovering from it. "Skye?" She couldn't even move as he got up from the bed standing in front of her. "You didn't regret it, did you?"

He looked so nervous, like he was waiting for her to say yes to that. She'd never seen Grant Ward look scared before. A laugh bubbled from her lips. "No, did you?"

"No." The words had barely escaped his lips before her mouth was latched to his. "Why did you run before?" he asked when they parted for air.

"Because I was scared too."

Grant's fingers ran up and down the side of her body, sending a trail of goosebumps up as he went. "You know we're going to have to keep this quiet, right? S.H.I.E.L.D. has a strike 'no dating coworkers' policy."

"I figured." She had. He kissed the side of her head and she considered telling him everything then and there. Instead, she kept her mouth shut.

It was supposed to be their weekend off. Instead, it turned out to be her and Grant getting held hostage by a psychopath looking for the Intersect and Grant being very confused about what that guy meant. Bryce wasn't there this time, he couldn't save them. She knew he had enemies, but she never had figured that they were this bad. She closed her eyes for a split second as she tried to collect herself, to keep the man from realizing that she had flashed on him. The man, Lenny Clark, a high ranking ex-CIA lunatic, had his gun trained on Grant.

"Let him go. He has nothing to do with this."

"Skye, you know what he's talking about?" Grant asked her, confused.

"But he is important to you, and you are important to Bryce, and Bryce had the Intersect last and I want it!" The man screamed.

"Bryce is dead! He's got nothing to do with this. I know where it is. I'll take you to it if you let him go." Getting Grant out was important, though it did leave the important question of how would she get out once she got Grant free?

"You know where the Intersect is? Bryce told you? I find that hard to believe." He pointed his gun at Grant again.

"He did! He sent that email to more than one person."

That caught his attention. He lowered the gun.

"He did, did you say?"

"Yes," she stated careful, "He sent it to me so I could make a copy of it. I know where it is."

The gun was pointed in her direction. "You're going to take me to it."

"You've got to untie me first." Lenny moved forward, taking out a knife and slicing through the ropes to free her. She stood up slowly, trying not to seem like to much of a threat. Nice and easy, just like Grant taught you, she thought before she rolled into the man and disarmed him, holding him at gunpoint instead. The situation reversed, she nodded at Grant. "Untie him."

Lenny laughed callously. "You're not going to shoot me."

"I'm Bryce Larkin's little sister," she eyed him, knowing her words had made the desired impact when his eyes widened slightly, "Are you really going to take that chance?"

Seeming to understand what that meant, he did move to untie Grant, who fought the guy to the ground the minute he was freed. She handed him the gun in distaste of it. She remembered Bryce's words for a long time ago, warning her that if anyone ever found out she had the Intersect in her brain, she'd be dead. She might not have what it takes to pull the trigger on the gun, but she was able to have Lenny mysteriously transferred from the S.H.I.E.L.D. facility that he was in to somewhere that he could see Bryce one last time. She knew that the man she called her brother was known in some circles as the angel of death. She knew he'd take care of him.

"What's the Intersect?" Grant finally asked late one night, when the curiosity seemed to have gotten the better of him. She knew the question had been bubbling up in him for the past week until now when he finally asked it.

"It's an OS." Off his confused, but adorable look, she added, "Operating system."

"I know what an OS is. What I don't understand is why someone would be ready to kill over an operating system."

"This one is special," she shrugged, "It contains all of the government's nitty gritty secrets. It's unhackable. And Bryce destroyed it."

He seemed to consider this, leaning back against the pillows in her bed. "You called him your brother."

"In a lot of ways, he's the only family I have."

"You said have, present tense, but you told that man that he was dead." She laughed.

"If I had a nickel for every time Bryce died, I'd be able to own a penthouse on 5th Avenue." She could see the wheels in his head practically spinning, "And no, he doesn't have any sort of superpowers. He's just kind of lucky."

"So tell me about this Intersect," he said after some silence, "Why would he think you know where it is? Did Bryce really email it to you."

"I didn't say he sent it to me, just that he sent it to more than one person." She shrugged. "The guy was an idiot if he thought Bryce would be that obvious. He was a lot smarter than to send an email where it'd sit around on a server, especially if he was stealing classified government secrets."

"And he's not in prison how?"

She shrugged. "He was forced to do it. By destroying it, nobody got it." She lay back beside him, looking up at the ceiling, and laughing slightly, "I think that's the only work story he's ever told me."

Ward rolled onto his side, pressing his lips to hers. She kissed him back, but it didn't lessen her guilt for not telling him. Outside of Bryce, no one knew, though. She had made sure of that, deleting her files from the system after the fact.

She wrote the coding and translated into pictures. Bryce had sent her the instructions on how to do it properly to change the system. She was making it more user-friendly, less migraines and more being able to interact with it like it was an actual computer. She could access the database of her own free will. It was nice, but it didn't solve the problem at hand. Sooner or later, someone would find out about the Intersect.

"Grant?" she asked as she rolled over in the bed that night, quietly so not to wake everyone.

"Yeah?" His voice was husky from sleep.

"I may have left some stuff out about the Intersect."

She could feel Grant shifting in the bed, turning to face her and study her face, despite it being dark. "What is it?"

"It's comprised of pictures, thousands upon thousands of pictures that give information and data.  _Andit'sinmyhead._ "

He sat up suddenly at this, sounding completely confused. "What?"

"The Intersect is in my head. It's a computer that downloads into whoever watches it. I didn't know what it was, opened it, and then it fried my computer to beyond dead."

"That sounds dangerous." She shrugged.

"It's only dangerous if people know or know where you are. Why do you think I moved around so much? Why I erased myself from the system?" He was quiet for a while and she worried that she had made him angry for lying to him. "Grant?"

"So we don't tell anyone then." He kissed her forehead. "Thank you for trusting me."

She closed her eyes in relief, a huge weigh lifting from her chest as she felt the guilt disappear. From now on, they were in this together.


	2. Who We Are (To the World)

There are days when Skye wakes up and thinks that it might be a normal day. Then she remembers that Coulson's gone and May hates her because she discovered the people she thought were her birth parents were actually her  _adopted_  parents. Part of her says "Thank God I don't have crazy and psycho killer genes!" The other part of her wants to know where she came from more than ever. The little girl who'd been left scared at the orphanage cried and ripped up the papers after May had left. The young woman who had been taught by the great Bryce Larkin was more ready to look for answers than ever. May's opinions be damned.

The bracelet mocks her from it's spot around her wrist, flashing every so often to remind her it's still on and working. Skye half wonders what would happen if she hacked SHIELD for real with this little toy on and deactivated it. Would they even notice? Would they even care? She could get Bryce to do it. He knew how to destroy whole computer networks in a matter of minutes.

She's been ducking seeing her S.O. because she doesn't think she could handle seeing him in his bunk with new scars, not right now at least. She had flashed on him earlier, something that hadn't happened since that first time she saw him. This time she saw him going into May's hotel room in Ireland and she felt cold. She's made a complete fool out of herself, offering herself to him, acting like he might want her the way she wants him. She should have known.

Sometimes she forgets that SHIELD is also a spy agency and that their jobs are dangerous. There are days she knows Bryce was right; she should have just gone and become some computer nerd for some IT company instead of trying to hack government organizations to find out why they have a file on you and why the woman you thought was a Marshall really turned out to be a SHIELD agent. But she's always loved a good mystery and she's going to have to see Grant sooner or later.

* * *

There are days when Bryce has been tempted to stop being Neal Caffrey. He doesn't want to. He's built a life there. He likes being Neal; Neal is good. Neal is everything Bryce isn't. Neal is caring and loving and good. He is loyal and has a weakness for beautiful women named Sara(h). He will admit that Bryce does share those qualities too, but Neal has one thing Bryce doesn't: friends who trust him, care about him.

Or maybe not.

A criminal. That's all Peter would ever see him as. He thinks that he preferred it when Casey was shooting him or when Chuck hated him, because at least then he deserved it. Danny Brooks had been a petty criminal and an artist. Bryce Larkin had been a computer nerd and a super spy. Neal Caffrey had been an art thief who was just trying to protect Peter. He doesn't know who Neal Bennett was; he has no experience being him. Sometimes he thinks that things might have been better if he had just been Neal Bennett, simpler, normal even.

Things were going to change. That much Peter had right. It was time things did change.


End file.
